how to make up one's mind: reason, passion, and ethics in spirit

M I C H A E L L A M B E K

How to Make Up One’s Mind: Reason,Passion, and Ethics in Spirit Possession

ABSTRACT

What does it mean to know one’s own mind, to make up one’s mind, or to be of

two minds? The paper explores some of the assumptions Westerners make about

mind and confronts them with elements from the ethnography of spirit possession

among Malagasy speakers. It challenges the assumption that a unified state of

mind, exemplified by pure reason as opposed to passion, is the necessary basis

for sound ethical judgment and action.

Keywords: action, passion, reason, ethics, models of mind, spirit possession

In 1985 an Air India flight out of Toronto exploded over the mid-Atlantic.This was one of the few pieces of news mentioning Canada to reach theinhabitants of the western Indian Ocean island of Mayotte where I hadcarried out anthropological fieldwork a decade earlier.1 The news wasreceived with some consternation in the home of my close friendsMohedja Salim and Tumbu Vita because the crash took place at approxi-mately the date on which, as I had written them, my family and I wereleaving Canada en route to Mayotte. Being unaware of the volume ofair traffic from Toronto, they were very worried. However, as in many acrisis and anxious moment before, Tumbu called upon their trusteddiviner, who assured them that we were safely on our way and wouldarrive by the end of the Muslim month. What makes this incident stand

1 I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Science and Humanities ResearchCouncil of Canada. The 1975 trip was funded additionally by the National ScienceFoundation, as was the 1985 trip by the National Geographic Foundation. Currentresearch and writing is assisted by a Canada Research Chair, supplemented by theCFI. While the majority of the inhabitants of Mayotte speak Shimaore, a Bantu language,I worked among speakers of Kibushy – a version of Malagasy and hence anAustronesian language – and subsequently in the city of Mahajanga in Madagascaritself. I am greatly indebted to the persons mentioned herein, for the most part by pseu-donyms. Thanks also to Marlene Goldman and Jill Matus for the invitation to present thispaper, and especially to Marlene for some good initial advice and subsequent scrupulousediting; she has considerably improved the argument, though all flaws rest with me. Thepaper has benefited from responses at the ‘Altered States of Mind’ symposium at theUniversity of Toronto, the Halbert Center at the Hebrew University, and theDepartments of Anthropology at Cornell, Ben Gurion, Haifa, and the University ofCape Town.

university of toronto quarterly, volume 79, number 2, spring 2010

doi: 10.3138/utq.79.2.720

out is that the diviner upon whom the family relied was not a livinghuman being, but a spirit (djinn), named Mze Bunu. Moreover, MzeBunu was called up in the body of Mohedja herself and spoke throughher. Thus while Mohedja was temporarily in a state of trance ordissociation – an altered state – the spirit reassured her family, wholater passed the information on to Mohedja, after the spirit departed.Mohedja herself later admitted to us that when she heard from Tumbuwhat the spirit had said she hadn’t believed it. When she came to theairport to meet us she wasn’t at all sure whether we would be there.

This paper opens up questions concerning what such altered states mighttell us about the relation of reason to passion and especially about cherishedWestern notions about the unity or consistency of the mind. I suggest that theclarity of what we consider an ‘unaltered’ or dispassionate state of mind isnot an essential prerequisite for ethical judgment or action. Moreover,spirit possession affords a kind of irony rather than certainty with respectto human understanding and hence acknowledges the unfathomability ofjudgment. Such irony is not specifically either intentional or unintentionalas it throws into question the very basis of intention itself.

Was Mohedja fearful that we had died or calmly expecting our arrival?Did Mohedja know her own mind? Or was she, as we sometimes – butalways metaphorically – say (in English), of two minds? Moreover, didMohedja mean what she said? Did the spirit? Was one of these positions‘merely’ a performance and the other one expressive of her ‘true’ thoughtsor feeling? If so, which was which? In what sense can she be said to bearresponsibility for either or both of these statements? If one state of mind isaltered with respect to another, does it necessarily follow that one utter-ance is true and the other false, one authentic and the other inauthentic,one serious and one non-serious, or perhaps skeptical, one rational andthe other emotional, one within the realm of the ethical and the otheroutside it, one normal and the other pathological? These questions indi-cate how committed speakers of English are to certain assumptionsabout the nature of mind in relation to the possibility for ethical judgmentand action and hence for being accountable for one’s words and decisions.

Insofar as we can speak of Mohedja and Mze Bunu’s utterances asperformance, we might ask about the relation of mind to performance, ofinner to outer or outer to inner. What is the relationship of performance towhat performers ‘really’ believe or to their states of mind? Is one merelythe expression or effect of the other? If so, how do we account for the differ-ence between the two statements or performances? We are very quickly ledinto extremely complex philosophical problems – not simply the problem ofknowing other minds, but of knowing our own. We could easily end up inthe infinite regress of the ghost in the machine pointed to by Gilbert Ryle.

Happily, these are not exactly my problems. I cannot describeMohedja’s mental state or states; that is not what ethnography is designed

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to do nor what the kind of anthropology I do is precisely interested in. ButI can describe the art of spirit possession and the way people practise itand live with it. And I can draw inferences about what this institutionand these practices tell us about mind and the human condition andwhat specific individuals make of, and with, the human mind and thehuman condition through the Malagasy tradition of spirit possession.Among other things, spirit possession in this form addresses a featurecentral to the human condition – our ability to symbolize means thatwe are never fully bound by present circumstances, that we can thinkabout the past and anticipate the future, and therefore that we canalways imagine alternatives, as, for example, whether the plane crashedor landed safely. Human beings are faced with what anthropologist RoyRappaport has called the ‘problem of alternative’ or what philosopherscall skepticism. It is not just the difficulties created by the fact that yourutterance, prediction, metaphor, argument, theory, religion, or system ofthought might seem more accurate, just, real, true, comforting, consistent,or attractive than mine, but also the problem of steady adherence for astretch of time to one position – that is, the problem of commitment toa specific course of action – that alternative raises. Humans are facedwith such matters as undecidability, uncertainty, inconsistency, incon-stancy, and ambivalence with respect to large matters and to small; yetwe cannot simply flutter from one attractive option to the next orremain poised in midair between them.

Western thought appears to invest a good deal in the concept of the‘unaltered’ or pure and unitary state of mind, characterized by reason,as the ground of truth, objectivity, decisiveness, consistency, and con-stancy, and hence as the necessary source of ethical action and commit-ment. I will explore aspects of this largely implicit cultural model andconfront it with cultural practices in which ethical action is not linkedexclusively to reason understood as unadulterated ‘mind.’ These prac-tices can be illuminated in turn by Western thinkers such as StanleyCavell or Alexander Nehamas who depart from the dominant model ofmind and its relationship to language and who emphasize, by contrast,the pervasive irony of the human condition in the sense of the unfathom-ability of the sources of our judgment and action (irony pointing, as itdoes, to doubleness, multiplicity, and uncertainty).

In the case of my arrival in Mayotte, spirit possession did not simply givevoice to two equivalent alternatives but rather opposed to a position of doubtone of relative certainty or conviction. In distributing not just ideas, but auth-ority and responsibility, among two or more minds, spirit possession handlesexistential matters of alternative and doubt very differently from disciplinaryregimes that ask people to purify their minds, to learn to recognize and holdconsistently to a single or unitary position or feeling, to be certain or to recog-nize the truth, to know, as we say, one’s own mind, or, in the case of indecision,

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to make up one’s mind – a commonplace phrase that grows more interestingthe more one reflects upon it. I suggest that assumptions about making upand knowing one’s mind, as though one were primarily its explicitlyknowing agent rather than, as it were, its subject or patient, are themselvessalient features of a dominant Western model of mind.

I do not by any means wish to reduce the complex art of spirit posses-sion to a single function but rather to trace an aspect of what it says aboutour common condition. As Cavell writes of opera, possession shows that‘humans . . . have at all times more than one register in which their wordsare uttered, so that the question of the relation between what is said andwhat is heard, hence the question of who utters, hence of sincerity, is con-tinually posed’ (102). Approaching possession from this angle, oneimplicitly aligned with irony, enables us to shift from an account inwhich people merely submit to an altered state of mind to one thatoffers people an alternative state of mind.2 It is an intermittent alternativeto the ordinary states of mind of the people who practise (speak and hear)it and an alternative to the unitary state of mind, as most of us understandselfhood. But, conceived as an alternative, it is not intrinsically pathologi-cal or bizarre. Spirit possession in Mayotte and Madagascar can makepeople sick, especially at its onset, but it is not in itself pathological.Illness within possession, no less than outside of it, is a sign that some-thing is wrong. Illness associated with possession is usually a symptomthat something is not right in the ethical realm, that is, in the relationshippertaining between the host, as I refer to the medium, and the spirits. Itmay be a failure by the host or a failure by the spirit, but in either case,it is a failure of recognition, hence a moral failing. This is usually relativelyeasy to address and redress; where it is not, it suggests that the context isnot spirit possession per se but something else, perhaps madness.

In Western thought an absence of clarity or consistency between whatone says (on the outside) and what one feels or means (on the inside) isoften considered an ethical failing. A paradigmatic statement of thiskind occurs in the Greek tragedy Hippolytus, composed by Euripides.When Hippolytus asserts, ‘My tongue swore to, but my heart did not,’John Austin appears to accuse Hippolytus of illegitimately excusinghimself for reneging on a promise. Referring dismissively to a ‘back-stageartiste’ (9–10), Austin, interestingly, places the inauthentic performance ofthe artiste on the inside, rather than, as essentialists would, on the outside:he frames the issue as a matter of Hippolytus’ obligation rather than his sin-cerity – of whether he keeps his word. Yet as Cavell points out in his gloss

2 Irony of course does not require the postulation of two voices or ‘senders’ from one bodybut it does follow from the juxtaposition of multiple voices. I draw here from the conceptof dramatic irony as developed by Kenneth Burke as well as the extremely helpfulphilosophical discussion in Nehamas. Irony in this sense need not be intentional.



of this passage, Austin here demonstrates uncharacteristically flawedjudgment; Hippolytus did not renege on his promise and was notmaking an excuse.3 How much more tempting would it be to accusespirit mediums, with their front-stage artistes, of evading responsibilityfor their statements by splitting their voices more radically and less con-sciously than did Hippolytus – having perhaps two contradictory wordsto keep or to renege on – and how tempting to allege that in an alteredstate of mind like trance one could bear no ethical responsibility in any case.

The Austinian strategy of interpretation would be to remain on theoutside, to compare the effects of Mohedja’s and Mze Bunu’s utterancesand their respective relations to the state of affairs they address. Thefirst step would be to discern their respective locutionary and illocution-ary functions and force, but rather than pursue a technical analysis of theethical consequentiality of speech acts, let me give a further illustrationfrom Mohedja’s life in order to address the question of whether alteringone’s state of mind affords justification for changing one’s mind.

In 1980 I discovered that Mohedja had been possessed by a new, femalespirit, Maimouna. Responding to my evident interest in seeing the fullcycle of the initiation of a spirit in a medium, Maimouna asked me tosponsor her ceremony and I agreed but with the proviso that as I didnot know when I would next return to Mayotte, Maimouna shouldrefrain from showing impatience or making Mohedja sick in the interval.On my return five years later, Maimouna and I took up where we had leftoff – to the consternation of Mohedja’s adult daughters who claimed tohave forgotten the very existence of a relationship between Maimounaand Mohedja, let alone with me, and who had no wish to see their bynow middle-aged mother in the midst of another, as they saw it, undigni-fied public initiation ceremony. Yet the spirit, who had not risen in theinterim, remembered her promise to me, as I had remembered my com-mitment to her, and in the end we went through with the ceremony.

This incident illustrates a striking feature of possession in Mayotte, thateach spirit is conceived as a continuous person such that he or she is heldaccountable for commitments made during prior manifestations. Eachinteraction with a spirit begins more or less where the previous encounterleft off and the spirit is expected to live up to the demands of ethical con-sistency. One of the skills needed to become an effective medium is theability to maintain this mental bookkeeping, especially if one has manyspirits, each with its own ongoing relationships with a number of otherpeople.

3 However, depending on the translation, it could be argued that Hippolytus was threaten-ing to do so. The play concerns the consequences of the sexual interest of Phaedra in herchaste stepson, Hippolytus. By keeping his promise and not revealing Phaedra’s confi-dence, Hippolytus condemns himself to the wrath of his father, Theseus.

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M I N D , T H E G A P

The questions raised by spirit possession cast a reflection on the Westerndiscourse of mind, challenging cherished assumptions concerning theunity of consciousness, the duality of mind/body, and the rational basisof ethical judgment. In this section I briefly explore assumptions that speak-ers of English make about mind as revealed in ordinary language. Englishspeakers (at least, those of my speech community) appear to make a sharpdistinction between reason and passion and to assume that one can act asan ethical person only when in a state of full reason. This ordinary orcommon-sense view is part of a broader Western tradition and finds itssource in European thinkers such as Kant and Durkheim.4

Spirit possession may sound exotic and strange to Westerners, but alteredstates of mind are not. As the metaphor of the stream well describes it,consciousness is intrinsically fluid, temporal, and dynamic. You could befocusing on my words one minute and daydreaming the next, concentratedon the task at hand or, as we say, absent-minded. You could be in love orenraged, hungry or sexually aroused, distracted or carried away by someurge or feeling, as, indeed, were poor Hippolytus’ counterparts, Phaedraand Theseus. We sometimes contrast such states of feeling with reason andworry about their power over us, as we say. We tend to be reasonablyhappy that unreasonable happiness does not last permanently. Or maybe not.

So, insofar as consciousness is mobile, the power to distinguish alteredand unaltered states of mind is at least compromised. You could reply thatone can speak of fluidity within the range of ‘ordinary’ or unaltered mind;craving a cigarette or pleasurably inhaling are not the same sorts of thingas psychosis or hypnosis. Then we would need to circumscribe the rangeof ordinary consciousness within which transformations can still bedescribed as relatively ‘unaltered.’ Perhaps by altered states we mean pri-marily conditions in which that very fluidity is disrupted, as the stream isdammed up or overflows its banks; post-traumatic stress is sometimesdescribed in this way. Obsessive compulsion might indicate the streamsucked into a whirlpool, catatonia a slowing down or freezing-over ofconsciousness, while attention deficit disorder might describe the oppo-site extreme. I do not wish to make light of serious psychiatric and neuro-logical disorders, but they are not my concern here. Consider the vastnumbers of people who consume antidepressants, Ritalin, or caffeine.Do these substances restore us to ourselves, to ordinary consciousness,or do they mask and alter it? Who is in a position to adjudicate this? I

4 An important question I cannot address here would be the degree to which Western phi-losophers have abstracted principles already embedded in ordinary language or, conver-sely, to which concepts derived from authoritative disciplines like philosophy andmedicine have penetrated and shaped ordinary language.



am asking where we draw the boundaries of the unaltered mind, withwhat awareness, and with what assumptions concerning the relation ofreason to passion and to ethical agency and judgment.5

Politically speaking, are antidepressants the opiate of the masses or dothey perhaps serve to de-anaesthetize us from the numbing effects of ahyper-mediatized consumer society, pervasive and deepening inequalityand conflict, and no clear means for voice or exit? Perhaps our currentsituation is one in which, relative to past times, or according to sometranscendental position about how the human condition ought to belived, we are all collectively in an altered state.6

Having briefly questioned the boundary of what might be described as‘unaltered’ with respect to state of mind, what about the limits of ‘mind’itself? Are not some of the conditions of mind I described better classifiedas states of body? Fatigue, sleep, lust, hunger, the hormones and syntheticmolecules that float through our bloodstream, and the heart and tongue ofHippolytus, among other things. And when we speak of more distinctlyaltered states like psychosis, autism, neurological disorders, or the experi-ences induced by consumer drugs like alcohol or cannabis, by techniqueslike yoga, dance, or sport, or even the effervescence generated through

5 Since writing this paper I have discovered the remarkable book by Emily Martin, BipolarExpeditions, which provides an extensive discussion about the borders of reasonwith respect to both ‘moods’ and ‘motivations.’ Catherine Lutz (1988) provides a path-breaking anthropological analysis of the relation of emotion to reason.

6 In his recent ethnography of the Manhattan project in post–Cold War New Mexico andthe impact of the atom bomb within American culture more generally, Joseph Mascoargues, following Walter Benjamin, that we live a kind of anaesthetized existence, butone in which the repressed lurks. Masco discerns a ‘nuclear uncanny’ – the dislocationand anxiety produced by the imperceptible yet threatening forces of radioactive contami-nation as well as the ever-present possibility of the bombs going off – that pervades all ofour lives. Colourless and odourless, radiation can affect genetic material, blurring thedistinction, so he argues, between the animate and inanimate. Time passes between radi-ation exposure and effect, which can be deferred to the next generation.

This is perhaps the most profound effect of the nuclear age, as individuals either numbthemselves to the everyday threat, or are conditioned to separate themselves from theirown senses, losing themselves in a space that is simultaneously real and imagined,both paranoid and technoscientific reality. For radioactive materials now execute theirown uncanny form of manifest destiny, travelling an unpredictable course throughecosystems and bodies, creating new social and biological beings, and with them, newtactile experiences of everyday life. (32)

And this is before Masco gets to issues of government security, secrecy, and surveillance.Paranoia may be justified. Phrased more positively, one could argue that we havecollectively reached the Socratic state of wisdom, of knowing that we do not know. Butwe are no happier than were the citizens of Athens to receive the message; we wouldprefer to simply trust our senses.

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collective spectatorship, are these not states that transcend a mind/bodydualism? Isn’t it odd that we speak of altered states of mind but rarely ofaltered states of body, even when we know we mean the latter? Is thisbecause part/whole relationships are differently conceived or experiencedin mind and body? Do we use mind-talk to express our condition holisticallyand existentially, and body-talk to break it down? In English, being in paindiffers from having a pain – in one’s wrist, or a headache. In ordinarylanguage, the body and its parts are available as the objects of our consider-ation in a way that the mind generally is not, even if the precise location ofpain, like a bellyache, is too often non-specific. To break the mind into discreteparts, we feel, would be to commit a category error more obvious than to dis-tinguish mind from body in the first place. Do we then conceive the leastaltered state of mind – the original state, as it were – to be equally the leastobjectifiable and hence somehow the least embodied, that is the purest, theleast sullied by the forces and processes of the sensory body? In all of this,the unaltered mind seems to be identified with reason.

Note how what I have listed as altered states of mind or body are oftenphrased as the products of things external to us, as though we wereinvaded or flooded by a feeling, if not a drug or an illness, and seeingthe world differently, despite ourselves. In other words, in contrast to theautonomous ‘unaltered’ mind rationally engaging selectively outwardwith its environment, here consciousness is expressed in terms of receptionand sensation as the outside floods in. To be anxious, hungry, obsessed, ordistracted, to feel and to suffer, is somehow to be taken over by something,perhaps by the body or at least by the senses. Such states of mind might bedefined as passions. Coming from the Greek pathos and Latin passio, theconcept of passion condenses ideas of suffering, affliction, sense perception,strong emotion, the condition of being acted upon, enthusiasm, grammati-cal passivity, an affection of the mind, and the passive, receptive part of theintellect (to summarize entries in the Oxford English Dictionary).

This view of the mind’s alteration from without is entrenched in andepitomized by biomedicine. As psychiatry and neurology grow evermore powerful and as each new edition of the Diagnostic and StatisticalManual is thicker than the last – as if the sheer number of alternative con-ditions being differentiated and described were an index of progress – anever-greater part of human experience comes to be broken down intodiscrete things we can have rather than the fluid ways that we do or are.7

In this respect the DSM resembles a kind of Ikea catalogue. Adjectivesand verbs are transformed into nouns, and the nouns are transformedfrom a language of vices into one of emotions and then into diseases

7 For example, having restless legs syndrome or irritable bowel disorder, or suffering fromAlzheimer’s rather than being demented or simply grown old, forgetful, and easilydisoriented.



and syndromes. This is a movement from the ethical to the medical, fromsoul to mind, from mind to brain, and from brain to brain regions andneurons.8 This historical process has been celebrated as liberation fromfalse attributions of agency (why should I be blamed for my pain oreven the pain my attributes cause others?). It has also been critiqued asthe progressive colonization of feeling, the disciplining of being, andthe medicalization of social ills.

Compare the following, partially unconscious and inter- rather thanintra-personal model of mind with its conjunction of passion withethics that is found in Botswana. Dikgaba is a process and subsequent con-dition in which the unstated disappointment of a senior matrilateral rela-tive at the actions or inaction of a relatively junior one inadvertentlycauses the latter harm, whether by means of illness, accident, or other mis-fortune (Schapera). It is thus a state of mind that flows between the bodiesof certain categories of people and along relations characterized ideally bycare (diffuse and enduring solidarity) rather than explicit jural authority.Long a feature of rural society, dikgaba remains of deep concern evenamong the European and American-educated lawyers of Botswana’sintellectual and professional elite (Jacqueline Solway, personal communi-cation). One might say that dikgaba is a more fully intersubjective andmobile alternative to the Freudian introjected and congealed superego(Solway and Lambek).

It is interesting that while the flow of harm is produced inadvertently andtacitly, and could be said to be caused by the distraction or forgetfulness ofboth parties, the restoration of well-being must be explicit, enacted with duedeliberateness. That is to say, the state of mind in question is not simply leftas internal and private to one individual but is performed and intersubjec-tive. To remove dikgaba entails acknowledging its presence – the personwho suffers must first accost the person identified as its source – suchthat prior acts of omission are turned into apologies on both sides. Theperson identified as the source of the dikgaba must declare, ‘If it was Iwho sent it, may it dissipate,’ so that tacit disappointment or irritation istransformed into explicit blessing. Such rational illocutionary acts areaccomplished through the mediation of the sensory field – a particularspecies of plant, also known as dikgaba, is brewed and spat from senior tojunior kin to enact the removal and blessing. The goal of these embodiedand articulated performances is peace of mind, no less than body, butdikgaba always remains a background worry, both of reception and of

8 For example (and speaking very loosely), I am tracing progressions like those fromfeeling worried to suffering an anxiety disorder and from understanding this as a spiri-tual condition to labelling it an emotional problem (perhaps with an unconscious conflictat its roots) to diagnosing a specific neurochemical problem susceptible to pharmacologi-cal intervention and locatable by brain imagery.

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commission. Like other kinds of Austinian performances accomplished bymeans of ritual action – agreeing to love and cherish in the course of awedding ceremony, for example – it is subject to performative effects andentailments. The primary entailment of a performative act is commitmentto it (as well as commitment to the order of which it is a part)(Rappaport), and such commitment then further compromises the auton-omy of the individual.

Other cultural worlds are not necessarily better or saner than ours; atleast, they too run up against their own limits and produce their own para-doxes. Along with the porous, passionable, or relational self 9 comes heigh-tened danger of intersubjective or interpersonal pollution. In such worldspeople are vulnerable to what I refer to as witchcraft – vulnerable to suffer-ing the illicit invasion from witchcraft by others, vulnerable to being accusedof carrying out witchcraft on others, and perhaps most saliently, vulnerableto the suspicion or realization that one has acted – unknowingly or not delib-erately – as a witch oneself. Dikgaba, it is evident, is processually and con-ceptually analogous to such a model of witchcraft, and indeed witchcraft isprevalent in Botswana as well, but dikgaba holds a different ethical valence,situated in the key of ambivalence, mediation, and morality rather thanthat of inversion, polarity, and immorality. It is very much an instance ofwhat I would call an ethics of passion. Widespread practices in circum-Mediterranean, Muslim, and Latin American societies concerning theeffects, prevention, and removal of the evil eye are not entirely dissimilar.

A C T I O N A N D P A S S I O N

My argument is that both the boundary between what is an unaltered andan altered state of mind and the boundary between mind and body arefrequently, explicitly or implicitly, characterized in Western thought bythe presence or absence of reason in contrast to passion. The unalteredmind is one of reason; the more altered the state of mind, or the moreostensibly embodied the condition, the greater the apparent eclipse ofreason and the more we speak of passion. If Masco’s nuclear uncannystems from an anaesthesia, a lack of feeling, or an inability to trustone’s senses, others worry about feeling too much – they fear passionand the extent to which it interferes with critical reason. Passion also con-trasts and interferes with action.

Discriminations between action and passion have ethical conse-quences. Here is Rae Langton writing (in a somewhat anachronisticway) on Kant:

9 Marilyn Strathern, following McKim Marriott, has memorably contrasted dividuals toindividuals (though she was referring primarily to the circulation of bodily substancerather than mind).



We are at once cogs in the grand machine of nature, and free agents in the Kingdom

of Ends. We are persons, members of an intelligible world, authors of our actions;

and at the same time animals, puppets of our genes and hormones, buffeted

about by our lusts and loathings. Inclinations are passions in the sense that they

just happen to us. And in so far as we let our actions be driven by them we allow

ourselves to be puppets, not persons. We allow ourselves, to use Kant’s own

metaphors, to become marionettes or automata, which may appear to be

initiators of action, but whose freedom is illusory, ‘no better than the freedom of

a turnspit, which, when once wound up also carries out its motions by itself.’

The inclinations are effects on us, they are pathe, and for that reason pathological.

If we let them be causes of our behaviour, we abandon our personhood. (495–96)10

Such concerns about freedom and personhood illustrate why it matterswhat we call an ‘altered state of mind.’ Attribution of state of mind hasbeen linked, at least since Kant, to accountability, to our judgment ofduty, responsibility, and, to draw on a different and more contemporaryphrasing, agency. From the Kantian position, an altered state is anethical wound insofar as it compromises reason and hence our abilityto deliberate freely, to say and do what we mean, and to mean what wesay and do. ‘I got carried away,’ ‘He didn’t know what he was doing,’‘She was under the influence,’ and so forth. We are familiar with poli-ticians and celebrities who excuse their bad behaviour by admitting topathology. It sometimes appears as though ethical character can berestored as easily as ‘entering rehab,’ but at other times the entire senseof personhood is compromised, as in the confession, ‘I am an addict.’

Kant’s dualism of passion and reason was taken up by Durkheim andpartially mediated in his distinction between the individual and thesocial. Durkheim writes, ‘There really is a part of ourselves which is notplaced in immediate dependence upon the organic factor; this is all thatwhich represents society in us . . . Passion individualizes, yet it also enslaves.Our sensations are essentially individual; yet we are more personal the morewe are freed from our senses and able to think and act with concepts’ (307–08). This is actually an inversion of Kant insofar as these concepts that are thebasis or means of reason come to us from the outside, from society, ratherthan from within. Moreover, Durkheim recognized the mutual compro-mises between thinking and feeling. ‘We cannot understand thingswithout partially renouncing a feeling for their life, and we cannot feelthat life without renouncing the understanding of it’ (153).

It is not my intention to challenge this general picture. But maybe Kantis wrong, or partly wrong, about pathe. It is telling that the Greek pathe orpathos means both ‘feeling’ and ‘disease,’ but that is no reason why what

10 Langton is citing Kant, Critique of Practical Reason. Thanks to Karen Sykes for drawing myattention to the essay.

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is unreasoned in Kant’s sense is necessarily unfree or non-ethical,let alone enslaving, or why the connection between passion and pathol-ogy is relentlessly negative. Maybe we can sometimes permit things tohappen to us, to accept, receive, or submit to them, and maybe there isreason and virtue in passion. I argue that we need not oppose theethical and the passionate or even the ethical and the pathological.11

Talal Asad has described ‘the passionate performance of an embodiedethical sensibility’ in contrast to ideas about individual responsibility andpunishment in fully intentional self-creating and self-empowering subjects(95).12 In the latter, the passions appear as altered or embodied states inrelation or comparison to some autonomous and dispassionate state inwhich ‘I’ am fully in control. But what kind of peculiar ideology is thisthat emphasizes – normatizes, idealizes – being in control? Who is incontrol of what? What is pure mind? Is not the state of reflexive conscious-ness, of acute deliberation, deliberate holding back or standing outside, notas particular as any other state of consciousness? Is not pure reason, devoidof emotion, apt to provide faulty judgment (Damasio)? Is it not somethingparticular to the ideology of the modern, perhaps Protestant, self to see anabsence of passion as the basic or normal state, in relation to which otherstates are altered, to see it as perhaps the most intrinsically valued state?Moreover, is it not a further peculiar argument to see such a rational and pas-sionless state as the one in which we are most ourselves?

We might ask whether this picture of the bounded, autonomous, singu-lar, homogenous, and authentic self, a self that we not only are but explicitly,if mysteriously, have, is a constituent of modernity and ask further whetherwe can trace its connections to the liberal subject, capitalist calculation, pos-sessive individualism, Protestant sincerity, Cartesian dualism, discursivegovernmentality, and especially – I suggest, but am in no position to fullydemonstrate – Kantian universal reason. It is certainly a model that fitsthe current obsession in social science theory with ‘agency,’ a conceptthat, while posed as social critique, actually replicates and reinforces thepicture. Too blunt an instrument to discriminate among the acts and mod-alities of action that make up our existence, and like so many other wordsin our language, agency has become, in the first instance, a relatively con-crete noun rather than a verb or adverb, and something that one has, anitem in one’s portfolio, rather than something one makes or does, althoughDescartes famously conceptualized the ego as thinking and being. We arenot simply agents but have agency. Furthermore, agency is extremely

11 As both Paul Antze and Dan Merkur reminded me in their responses to the original talk,the Kantian model is not the only one to be found in the history of Western thought;Romanticism and religious grace look quite different.

12 Asad’s book, especially chapters 2 and 3, offers extensive and sophisticated argumentsthat presage much of what I say more superficially here. See also their application topious Muslims by Mahmood and Hirschkind.



valuable, a scarce commodity in the political economy of power, certainlymuch more valuable than its converse, call it patiency, so disregarded it isnot even a word in current use. Thus, when verbs are positively attributedto the self, they are phrased emphatically in the active rather than thepassive; Descartes’ ego thinks rather than is thought. That is to say, themind is understood predominantly to possess rather than to be possessed.It is properly an observer more than a participant; an agent not a patient;individual and separate from, rather than collective and connected to; sep-arating from others and subject over its internal and external environments,rather than subject to them (the various – and rapidly eroding – disclaimersof psychoanalysis and post-structuralism notwithstanding).13

Spirit possession exemplifies passion in the complex sense provided bythe OED as the spirit medium appears to be taken over by an externalagent, becoming ill, dissociated, excited, etc. And yet, despite the term’scommon usage, possession is a mode of being rather than something onesimply has. Moreover, it affords privileged space for detached reasonand distinctive ethical action.

Mohedja developed relations of possession with several spirits over thecourse of her life. She was ill each time a new spirit first entered her andimpatiently awaited the curing rituals that would bring it to full presenceand speech; she was also ill also whenever one of her spirits was angry atbeing neglected in some way. Sometimes her transitions into trance wereintense, head and upper torso thrashing wildly, in time to the rhythm ofthe drumming or clapping, faster and faster; at other times she slipped inand out of trance quite smoothly. But when she was fully in trance andwhen the spirit had had the rituals that legitimated its presence in herlife, she would look you in the eye and speak forthrightly. Mze Bunuwas the spirit of hers with whom she was most intimate and whom shemost trusted. Her husband, also a spirit medium, had nothing butrespect for Mze Bunu, and the two of them, husband and spirit, had estab-lished, as Mohedja put it, a solidary bond of male friendship. As all threeof them would sometimes indicate, they were olo raiky, ‘one person,’ thatis, of one mind, sharing the same interests.14

13 Even if we could agree that a detached, rational, active, and autonomous state of mind,purified, as it were, of bodily sensation, is in principle right and good, perhaps wedeceive ourselves in thinking we have achieved it. Despite the exemplars of Christianascetics and philosophical moral saints, of single-minded logicians and mathematicians,perhaps our states of mind remain deeply embodied. The brilliant logician Kurt Godelgrew so anxious about being poisoned that he reputedly died of self-starvation.Interesting explorations of this theme can often be found in fiction; see, for example,The Mind-Body Problem and Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel, both byRebecca Goldstein, and The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers.

14 Psychically, Mze Bunu represented for Mohedja a beloved and much older brother, whowas widely respected as a diviner and healer in his own right and who was possessed byMze Bunu’s older brother. Mohedja had moved far from her brother on marriage, but

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Once, during the first year that I knew her, when Mohedja must havebeen in her early forties, I found myself alone with Mze Bunu. After talkabout other matters he asked me to warn Mohedja not to be so stubbornand self-confident. He referred to an occasion when she had bluntly dis-missed a man who had made advances to her when she was alone in thefields. Asserting that Mohedja was not as strong as she once had been,Mze Bunu said that she ought to use more circumspection and diplomacyin the future. When Mze Bunu left and I had passed on the message,Mohedja described the incident at some length. This was the first timeshe had spoken of the event to anyone; the spirit had asked me to passon the message because Mohedja’s husband would have wanted toknow the identity of the other man and gone on to confront him.15

Here again is an uneasiness of mind distributed between two distinctvoices, more and less certain, inner and outer. The inner voice of fearthat was covered by the outer one of bravado at the fields is nowpicked up by Mze Bunu to speak incisively over Mohedja’s ownsilence. More clearly than in the instance of my safe arrival, this is aninstantiation, to borrow a phrase from Foucault, of care for the self.Speaking through Mohedja, Mze Bunu is operating as her objective butnurturant counsellor. Here the dissociated, altered state of mind is themore detached, the more observant, rational, and critical.

This stance is by no means specific to Mohedja. Consider Lidy, a malespirit medium whom I met some years later in Mahajanga in Madagascar.One of the spirits to regularly possess Lidy and to serve as a healer for theresidents of his dense urban neighbourhood is a French-speaking sailorwho lived during the mid-nineteenth century. A whole boatload ofCreole sailors in the service of the Sakalava king drowned when theirship capsized en route between Madagascar and Mayotte.16 When theSailor appears in the body of Lidy, he dons a white and blue-trimmedsailor’s shirt and cap, smokes Gitanes, and drinks rum. He speaksFrench by preference and much more fluently than his medium.He likes to reminisce and sometimes speaks about Lidy himself, in thethird person and with the worldly wise, je ne sais quoi quality we – andat least some Malagasy – associate with the French. The Sailor said

when she first became possessed by the spirit who subsequently identified himself asMze Bunu, the elder brother was called in to help. It could be said that, with MzeBunu, Mohedja had introjected the strong elder brother and indeed a version of thevery person who had served as her original healer. For further discussion of MzeBunu and introjection, see Lambek, ‘Fantasy in Practice,’ and ‘Catching Up.’

15 See Lambek, ‘Spirits and Spouses.’16 Mohedja was possessed by one of these spirits as well, but in her he was only a carouser,

rising at the parties thrown for spirits by new mediums in order to dance, smoke, anddrink beer.



wryly but fondly of his medium’s early attempts to become an artist,‘Il n’avait pas de talent, peut-etre, mais il s’amusait.’17

We might describe the split in each of these cases as one of perspectiveand the contrast of perspective as one between subjectivity and objectiv-ity. But note that it is the spirit who offers the more objective position. Thealtered state of mind is, through the vehicle of spirit possession, the morerational, in effect, the more dispassionate.18

P A S S I O N A S P R A C T I C E A N D P L A Y

Both Freudian theory and linguistic pragmatics (not to exclude other forms ofWestern theory and practice) recognize that we are not quite as rational,detached, and autonomous as some of us – especially certain kinds of ration-alist or existentialist philosophers, but also actors in the public sphere – like toclaim, that we have less control over what happens inside ourselves and overour boundaries, hence between us, than, according to a dominant ideal, weshould. Psychoanalytic object relations theory articulates internal receptivityand interconnection explicitly (Mitchell, Chodorow; with respect to spiritpossession, Lambek, ‘Fantasy in Practice’), while ordinary language philos-ophy has a somewhat parallel or complementary account of the public con-ditions and consequences of speaking. Other accounts of passion have lessconcern for the sociality of undetached action. Psychologist MihalyCsıkszentmihalyi has described as ‘flow’ the condition of focused attentionattained in a practice we fully enjoy. While deeply engaged or absorbed inan activity, the mountain climber, tennis player, musician, reader, or writer,but also the pious religious practitioner, contemplative thinker, Net surfer,or the person simply having fun may not notice time passing. Here theactivity engages us; we are taken over – possessed – by it.19 Activity hereimplies embodied disposition, what Bourdieu describes as ‘a feel for thegame,’ such that we can play it without thinking about the rules. It is nodoubt central both to ordinary routine and to extraordinary creativity.

Flow is the psychological expression or state of mind correlative to theinternal good described in Alasdair MacIntyre’s elaboration of practice in

17 ‘He may not have had much talent, but he enjoyed himself.’ See Lambek, ‘Body andMind,’ and Weight of the Past, 252–6; for a similar sort of event by means of spirit posses-sion in a different cultural context, see Masquelier. For more subtle ways in which spiritpossession may encourage and enable reflexivity, see Boddy.

18 I could give instances where, by contrast, the voice of the spirit is more emotive andneedy than that of the host, but that does not detract from the argument.

19 The concept or condition of flow is not substantially different from dissociation, andindeed it is possible that trance is a kind of flow intensified beyond a certain threshold.In any case, dissociation is clearly not so bizarre or unusual and perhaps not ‘altered’from any norm. What is distinctive about spirit possession is not that mind per se is dis-sociated or distracted but that my mind is ostensibly replaced by that of another. In otherwords, it specifies exactly with what or by whom I am impassioned.

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Aristotelian ethics. A good internal to a practice consists of the pleasure orsatisfaction that engaging, training, and perhaps stretching one’scapacities and skill affords in contrast to an external good like a salary,trophy, or promotion. Now, a practice performed for its own sake, thatis, for the internal goods it offers, and thus in which means and endsare conflated, is one model of ethical activity. Moreover, insofar as virtu-ous action is the product of a relatively continuous exercise of judgmentconceived within practice rather than outside of it, it becomes imbricatedin disposition or character. Virtuous practice operates less well from astate of mind that is detached or self-conscious than from a state ofmind that is engaged with or taken by the activity. We could say that,like the virtuosity of a musician or athlete, virtue is experienced as some-thing that flows through us rather than an object upon which we exercisea kind of external control. In this sense virtue is closer to notions ofpassion or pathos than of action, reason, or agency.

Conversely, self-consciousness implies a kind of distance from immedi-ate relations and activity. It is in such states that the distinction betweenmind and body appears most obvious. Hence our perceptions of clumsi-ness and embarrassment. Detached thinking is what philosophers andother intellectuals do, or say they do, much of the time, but that is noreason to make contemplative or critical reason the epitome of mind orthe basis for ethics. Our consciousness is no less detached and contempla-tive than it is active and practical. We are engaged in and with the world,making, doing, and playing.20

Malagasy spirit possession vividly illustrates such multi-faceted engage-ment in which doing, making, and playing are combined. One of the quitewonderful things about it is that the spirits are individuated, publicly recog-nized persons or personages in their own right who, like the Sailor, consist-ently play their part, according to character but not sticking to a script. Ashistorically situated characters, their messages may also have public reson-ance. Consider what happened when Mme Doso, a spirit medium inMahajanga, received a new television. The TV was a gift from a satisfiedclient of a spirit who possessed Mme Doso and who had served duringhis life as an official during the colonial period and was depicted as a fran-cophile. A different spirit suddenly rose in the medium and angrily threa-tened to smash the screen. This was an ancestor of the colonial-era spiritwhose healing activities had inspired the gift, a spirit who had himselflived in pre-colonial times and had nothing but suspicion and disdain for

20 The latter remarks are inspired by Hannah Arendt, Human Condition. Nevertheless, itcould be said that Arendt’s model retains a certain tension between Aristotelian andKantian influences. She retains the Kantian divide between free reason and boundsenses, relocating it in the divide between public action and private labour. I’m indebtedto remarks by Sophie Day for the latter insight.



Western artifacts. He was incensed and frightened by the modern weaponryhe observed on the television, and he also complained that the medium,Mme Doso, had not sought his permission when she decided to installthe television, as would have been the courteous and wise thing to do.The upshot was that Mme Doso, the widow of a Comorian soldier in theFrench colonial army and someone who enjoyed watching television butwas herself frightened by violence and the sound of guns, was forced togive the set away. The act of the pre-colonial spirit, no doubt a passionate per-formance at the time it took place, and subsequently recounted with MmeDoso’s characteristic verve, is an instance of what I have called the poiesisof history (Lambek, Weight of the Past), a dramatic composition in whichvoices from various epochs are juxtaposed to one another in the present.Here it offers a spontaneous, yet acute and complex, performance of theambivalence surrounding French conquest and subsequent modernization,no less than a critique of the excessive violence depicted on television, itself acompeting medium for the poiesis of history. This interpretation wasreinforced when I learned that, at the time, Mme Doso had been watchinga film about the Vietnam War, that is, about another French colonial con-quest.21 It could be said that performances such as these serve not only asthe consciousness of history but as historical conscience.

M I N D A S B O D Y

I want to turn finally to a case in which the relationships between alteredstates of mind and altered states of body, as well as between subjectivityand intersubjectivity, are configured rather differently. I summarize thefacts as the protagonist, a man I here call Ali, recounted them to me.Ali was one of the very first young people from his village to visit metro-politan France. He stayed with an older married sister who had precededhim and he trained as an electrician until he decided on a career in theFrench army. He signed up enthusiastically and was happily in trainingat a base near his sister’s residence when his mother decided to visitthem from Mayotte. She was possessed by a spirit that had also possesseda number of other members of the extended family over several gener-ations and who was considered to look after their welfare. Shortly afterhis mother’s arrival, Ali began to suffer from something like rheumatism.Movement was very painful and he could barely walk or dress himself,making work on the base virtually impossible. He was very concernedand sought medical diagnosis and treatment. Nevertheless, his superiorofficers soon accused him of malingering and their suspicions were

21 On subsequent visits I sometimes saw her parked in front of the television of one of herlodgers but she was selective about what she watched. For further discussion, seeLambek, ‘Memory,’ and also Weight of the Past, 256–60.

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reinforced by the fact that whenever Ali left base on a weekend pass hefelt fine. Eventually, and much to his dismay, Ali had to ask for a dis-charge. Since then he has married a cousin and moved back to thevillage, where both he and his wife have intellectually satisfying and pres-tigious white-collar jobs. There has been no recurrence of his symptoms.

Ali says that the spirit who possessed his mother induced his rheuma-tism. I have not had the opportunity to speak directly to the spirit, butAli’s mother told me that she herself had strongly disapproved of the mili-tary career because she was afraid Ali could get killed. She had observedimages of the first Gulf War on television and noted that they alwaysseemed to put Black soldiers on the front lines. While Ali staunchly main-tained his extreme distress and disappointment at what was happening tohim at the time, it appears that Ali had been of two minds. His wish toleave the military was not strong enough for him to simply quit, andperhaps was not even available or acceptable to his consciousness, yet, asAli himself was not possessed of a spirit, he did not have recourse to asecond, dissociated voice. One could say that his condition manifestednot as an explicitly altered state of mind, but rather as an altered state ofbody, that he was of two bodies, one on the base and one off it.

Ali’s dilemma was an ethical one. I have no idea whether his uncon-scious motivation to quit the army was more out of fear or the desire toaccede to the wishes of his mother, or had some other source, but what-ever the case, it lay opposed to his conscious desire to respect his superiorofficers and himself, to be an honourable man and to lead the adventur-ous life of a soldier. But leaving the army was also to do the right thing byhis mother, to marry a cousin, as his mother had requested, and returnand contribute to his community. There were conflicting demands onAli, conflicting ways in which he should be an honourable man, eachentailing its own risks of dishonour and disappointment. Ali’s conflict,and hence, as we see it, uncertainty of mind, was displaced and resolvedby the certainty of his body. After futile resistance, he had to accept itsdecision.22

This might be considered a case of self-deception, but to follow theargument of Herbert Fingarette, this does not make Ali’s actions unethi-cal. Fingarette distinguishes between personal agency, or identity, andmoral agency, or responsibility. Whereas a sociopath could acknowledgehis act while refusing to take responsibility for it, a self-deceiver couldtake moral responsibility while disavowing the act as her own. Ali epit-omizes Fingarette’s ethical self-deceiver. His disavowal of personalagency was a sign of his integrity or ‘inner dignity’ (Fingarette 139), his

22 For full discussion, see Lambek, ‘Rheumatic Irony.’ For more on local ideas of bodilycause as social and moral index, and as contrasted with individual desire, here ininverse of Durkheim, associated with mind rather than body, see Lambek, ‘Taboo.’



inability to recognize the need to renege on his contract. Concomitantly,his acceptance of responsibility, indicative in a positive sense of hisethical integrity, is evident in his suffering, his attempts to get well, andhis final request for dismissal. Self-deception and spirit possession hereenable a sane outcome to the dilemma in contrast to the steadfastnessof Hippolytus, who refused to go back on his word despite his urgentneed and wish to do so, which could produce only tragedy.

If the illness is fundamentally or intrinsically an ethical one, its arena isprecisely not that of the fully rational, unaltered mind, transparent toitself, but rather that of the body, in which a conflict of dispositions isplayed out. Ali’s condition thus bears similarity to hysteria as manifest inthe symptoms of Breuer and Freud’s patients as recounted in Studies onHysteria. One of the attractive things about that work is Freud’s generallypositive comments about the ethical sensibilities of his patients. Hysteriais seen not as a tactic for shirking responsibility but as a way of avoidingrecognizing things that would run counter or contrary to the sufferers’sense of themselves as ethical persons, in a word, to their character.

In each instance, a conflict of moral agency emerges as embodiedsymptoms. The difference is that spirit possession enables Ali to be ‘oftwo bodies’ whereas the hysterics could be of only one, hence morefully incapacitated. The protagonists are all acting ethically, or at leastnot unethically, their sense of obligation evident in the contortions oftheir bodies. For Freud, of course, in the wake of Kant, the cure lay inbringing the hidden motivation to light in the rational mind. But whatthe cases disclose is that, first, the rational mind is not the only arenafor ethical motivation or conflict, and second, at least for Ali, that theillness can be resolved without recourse to fully rational deliberation oracknowledgement. Put another way, states of reason and states ofpassion are not mutually exclusive. As psychoanalysis has come torealize since Freud, insight – the goal of cure – is not necessarily amatter of pure reason or explicit knowledge, but rather is manifest in prac-tice, or, as Freud put it, in the ability to love and to work.

Elsewhere, I’ve referred to Ali’s condition as one of rheumatic irony,drawing on the account of irony given by Alexander Nehamas.Nehamas writes that irony ‘enables us to play at being someonewithout forcing us to decide what we really are . . . Irony always andnecessarily postulates a double speaker’ (59–60). This is exactly thecase of spirit possession. But this is not necessarily intentional or basedon full knowledge. As Nehamas puts it, ‘irony often insinuates that some-thing is taking place inside you that your audience is not allowed to see,but it does not always entail that you see it yourself. Irony often commu-nicates that only part of a picture is visible to an audience, but it does notalways entail that the speaker sees the whole. Sometimes, it does not evenimply that a whole picture exists. Uncertainty is intrinsic, of the essence’

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(67). In Ali’s case, the play of knowing and not knowing, of certainty anduncertainty, is manifest in the register of body rather than of mind. Ali ispulled in two directions – and as a result, quite literally immobilized.

As previously noted, a critical feature of Nehamas’s argument is that itworks without the prevalent assumption that irony is intentional. What isambiguous is precisely intentionality itself. Hence I suggest tentatively,and with deference to Ian Hacking’s cautions about applying anachronis-tic schemes of classification, a re-description of Freud’s hysterics, as Idescribe Ali, as suffering from rheumatic irony. I repeat the caveat thatwas overlooked by certain readers of my original text:

In referring to the illness or mode of illness as irony, I am suggesting that the

irony is embodied and intrinsic and precisely not that it is conscious or

reflective. I am not denying the authenticity of the suffering. Rather, I am

suggesting that however real the symptoms, they cannot be reduced to a

single, clear-cut cause [or alternative] or that, if there were such a cause, we

could never know it with complete certainty. The irony of the illness is

precisely an expression of its evasion at being pinned down by sufferer,

observer, or therapist. (Lambek, Rheumatic Irony 52; second italics added)

To sum up, is the mind most fully itself when engaged in detachedreason? An influential picture suggests that the unaltered mind is rationaland autonomous. One can ‘know one’s own mind’ and this state ofknowing one’s mind exemplifies what an unaltered state of mind is. Ina state of deliberative reason the individual is ready for agentive action,and only from this state could such action be accounted ethical. Thealternative to autonomous reason is passion, a word subsuming ideasof suffering, affliction, sense perception, strong emotion, the conditionof being acted upon, enthusiasm, grammatical passivity, etc. In challen-ging this picture I don’t mean to suggest that what is passionate isalways ethical or what is ethical is always passionate.23 But by the sametoken I don’t accept that the only ethical action is deliberate and deliber-ated, that the ethical is purely and exclusively rational, or that the auton-omous rational self is the only legitimate ethical actor.

I began with an account of Mohedja, whose doubt was counterpoisedto the certainty of Mze Bunu. Ali’s wish to be a soldier was offset by theindubitable signals imposed by his body that he could not be one. Wecould say that Ali had his mind – or body – made up for him. The ques-tion remains, in what state, or by whom?

23 Elsewhere (Lambek, ‘Anthropology,’ ‘Nuriaty’) I have suggested that Platonic dualism ofpoetry and philosophy (passion and reason) is better replaced by a triadic Aristotelianmodel in which praxis in effect mediates the distinction.



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how to make up one's mind: reason, passion, and ethics in spirit

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